Marla Hlady & Christof MigoneOn And On And Off

From home to work. From work to home. You get on your feet, on the bus, train, plane, bike. You get off your feet, off the bus, train, plane, bike. You walk, you ride, you travel. Sometimes you arrive on time. Often you are running late. Transportation gets you from one place to another. From point A to point B. Arrivals and Departures. Movements with purpose. Kinetics with intent. But sometimes you get on and it goes on and on and on and on and on. It feels like you might never get off. We are destined to destinations. A life on transit, a life in transit.

Each participant in the On And On And Off (OAOAO) choir was given 12 prompts. They could each interpret them in their own way. The main focus of the prompts was their commutes from home to work and back. We asked them to not only listen as they travelled, but also sound their soundscape, voice their listening, and make noise with their experience.

From the typical scenario involving traffic congestion to the transition from bedroom to home office, work is a mindset. What is your relationship between life and work? How is your work-life balance? With the recordings the OAOAO choir sent us we then playfully searched for the underlying rhythms that drive us all—drive us to work, drive us home, drive us around the bend.

• Recordings by the OAOAO choir: Christa Eder, Hans Groiss, Claudia Gschweitl, Monika Kalcsics, Ulrike Leitner, Karin Linortner, Susanna Niedermayr, Ursula Scheidle, Anna Soucek, Alexander Tschernek, Mia Kirsty Weisz, Elisabeth Zimmermann, Stefanie Zussner.
• Mixing by Christof Migone (1–8, 11–12), Marla Hlady (9­–10).
• Mastering by Miguel Carvalhais.
• Images by Marla Hlady.
• Commissioned by Kunstradio (ORF Vienna).
• Thanks to Elisabeth Zimmermann, Miguel Carvalhais, and all the OAOAO choir participants.

Prompts for the OAOAO choir

12 people doing 12 things

1. On your commute to the ORF try to remember all your thoughts, once you arrive at the studio try to vocalize them without words in the order you thought them.
2. If you usually read during your commute, the day you are doing the recording, try to remember what you read that morning and summarize what you read using only 12 verbs.
3. If you usually listen to music during your commute, this time don’t listen to music, instead record yourself humming all melodies that come to mind.
4. If you usually listen to podcasts during your commute, this time don’t listen to a podcast, instead pretend you are a podcaster hosting your first show, but you can only say every second word, the words you skip should be left as pauses.
5. If you usually scroll on social media during your commute, roll a ball on the ground alongside you just outside the door of your apartment and just inside the door of the ORF. The ball can be of any material, any size. The distance is up to you. Try to record it with the microphone as close as possible to the ball as it rolls along.
6. During your commute put a recording device into a glass container, close the lid, and put it in your bag.
7. Count the steps between your apartment’s front door and your building’s front door and record yourself saying the number in all the languages you speak.
8. Record yourself going to work. On your next day off, at the same time as you would have gone to work, stay in bed and listen back to the recording on headphones and record yourself narrating the route you took in whatever style you choose. This should last as long as your recording, you do not need to always speak, silences are ok.
9. Make one sound that you think says it all about how you feel about your commute. Do it twice, once as loud as you can, the other as quiet as you can, both as close the mic as possible. And twice again, but this time as far from the mic as possible, but still within the same room.
10. v1: If you have a home office, set a recorder on your desk and start recording, then walk back and forth from your bed to your desk for as long as it would take you to walk from home to the ORF at Küniglberg, each time you reach your desk say ‘O’. v2: Record yourself saying ‘O’ the moment you leave your home and again the moment you come back at the end of a day at work. v3: Record yourself repeating the letter ‘O’ as many times as the number of years you have worked at the ORF.
11. Say 12 words starting with the letter ‘R’ and try to stay on the ‘rrrrrr’ for as long as possible. Stretch it until you almost forget what the word is.
12. Repeat the letter ‘F’ as fast as possible for one minute.

Press-release